


Learning to Let Go

by abbichicken



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Study, Charles is a Stalker, M/M, Mind Control, OTP Feels, Powerplay, Telepathy, poor relationship dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 09:59:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11377866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: Charles and Erik have distance between them, but never quite enough. Angst and hand-wringing, mind-meddling and regret.___





	Learning to Let Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevendeadlyfun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendeadlyfun/gifts).



> Dearest recipient - I do hope you enjoy this! It's...very much my wheelhouse, and I loved your prompt. Set vaguely after movie!Apocalypse, but inferred by years of bits of Charles and Erik absorbed across the entire film/comic canon and distilled into a general sense of "FFS/such angst/can't you guys just...".

Erik looks up, the glare present even as he focuses.

"And you are?" he asks.

Charles' breath catches in his chest, and the muscles of his scalp throb with the residue of his energy. Erik looks angry, tired, ready, many things. But...not familiar.

He shakes his head - a mistake, this was a mistake, it's always been a mistake, every damn time it's a mistake and he never learns from himself, nor from anything else in this pitiful excuse for a world around him. He leaves, breathing shallow and staccato from his efforts, muscles twitching across his ageing self, the chair sticking on uneven floorboards, his shaking, apologetic hands only making matters worse.

Erik turns his attention to the ceiling, his dreams fading, the face he awoke to drifting from his memory before even the shadow of Charles' chair is gone.

Charles undoes his damage, of course he does, he’s not a monster, you’re not a monster, this isn’t your fault and he takes that waking-up away too. It wouldn't help. Nothing ever helps. He hates that he so much as tried. It isn’t even an attempt. It’s a cruelty to them all, to himself, an act of self-harm and an insult to mutants everywhere, an inability to curtail and withhold that which is possible to him. 

The repair work is tricky, embroidery in the consciousness, Erik is back asleep as Charles is in the car, driver (let’s leave her nameless, she won’t know it was her, so what does it matter) and Charles is picking away at the components in a way that he has practiced only on Erik. 

It’s fine, of course it is, it doesn’t change who Erik is. How could it? Charles is only editing out responses to his own behaviour, things that should, could, never have happened. There is no evidence. There are no witnesses. The only reason it has to be this way is because Erik is so…fragile, yes, damaged, the things that have happened to him mean that Charles cannot simply behave as he might have done with anyone else…

…he would never do this with anyone else, of course…

…it’s just the way it has to be.

_You didn’t have to do it at all._

Erik’s voice. Charles’ head. Not real. Manifest fear and guilt. 

_If you can’t be everything, if you can’t be with me – with us – then please, leave well alone._

Erik’s voice in Charles’ head is a little more elegant, a little more gracious, and, frankly, slightly more romantic. Charles loves it when Erik is a gentleman and his ways are so charming, so tall, so contained…

…Erik in Charles’ head is a fallacy, an excuse. A slow torment that bears so little resemblance to reality, but wears its face perfectly.

Charles has too much time in his own head. He‘s always envied the way that Erik appears to have perfect control of his own mind, his powers, the way that he can keep things bottled, focused, determined or contained as required. 

The potential is the most painful thing. But it is always, at least, something to live for. 

________

It gets harder the longer it goes on. The living.

Erik is so easy, so very, very easy to catch and pull and hold and twist and shape, and to watch him barrel along without taking any of the options open to him, without even trying to pull himself closer to Charles, it's maddening. Charles makes himself available – makes their lives available. 

Invites him in every time. Every time. Come teach, be a lecturer. Move in, make yourself useful. Come away with me, we could start again.   
Stop it.

Charles can see their lives stretching ahead, unfulfilled, derailed by a thousand causes, by new mutants, old mutants, the interference of the humans and the belief that every one of these inconveniences is worth saving the world for and from.

He has the power to remove everything from their way. To block Erik from connection with anyone but himself - would that be wrong? [Even the question, come ON, Professor] Would it be cheating, to make him unable to recognise the affections, communications, even of anyone else?

The scope of Charles' power blinds every aspect of his personality at times. The possibilities. The sap, sap, sap of his energies, such as they remain, gone in the planning of stolen time, borrowed moments, forced expressions, the creation and the detail of every little moment of every little plan.

They could be happy, you see, so happy...out of town, out of mind, somewhere beautiful, somewhere calm...Erik is good with his hands, sculpts, wears overalls, makes ornaments in…

…and every image disintegrates even as Charles tries to capture it, everything falls away until it’s rivers of blood and inexplicable metal shards falling about them like cities raining down in constituent parts. Probably as it would be; his conviction their relationship is forever doomed is no place to start a dreamscape from. 

If he could just stop picking at the scab. 

_____

_I think you should come back. Move in._

Erik woke up like that not an hour ago. Breath already held tight in his lungs, confronted by the statement. The thought there in his mind, waiting, ready, prepared like a vista in front of grandly-opened curtains. A prospect so immediate and full that it takes no coming to consciousness, no caffeine, no buttering up, no further information.

He's told Charles not to do this often enough. And Charles has promised him he wouldn't, said he can't, said that's not a part of him, and they both knew he was lying, but neither made it bigger than it needed to be, because both knew that that's who Charles must be in order to play any sort of role in the universe created for them both. A liar, and an idiot. With as much power as they wield perpetually seething at their literal fingertips, greatness and the moral high ground is only ever a hopeful aspiration.

Standards, Erik thinks, are for them  
.  
His refusal to hold Charles accountable for these moments is one of many reasons they continue to happen. 

Erik picks up the telephone, because Charles doesn't enjoy them and petulance is a mainstay. Hank answers, and Erik pretends to be an Italian professor of literature because Hank can be fooled with such basic pretence (as far as he understands it; it's also possible that Hank couldn't care less about either of them and doesn't much enjoy the telephone either), and because it is perpetually pleasant to make these small hitches in the fabric of the truth everyone concerns themselves with. Truth, again, is for them. 

"Stop it, Charles."

"Erik, I declare! And I'd been so hoping to catch up with Vincenzo..."

"I will..." Erik only ever remembers the indignant jawache from clenching his teeth at Charles after it's manifested. He huffs, and tries to reset. Jettisons the gentle, sneaking suggestion in the back of his mind that he could’ve slipped into the Italian he speaks inordinately well, only for the fun of it, only to string Charles along that little bit longer, but then knowing Charles, he’d be jerking off to the soft vowels of it all night, and Erik wouldn’t give either himself or Charles the satisfaction.

As the silence extends, Erik can hear Charles' petty little smile. He regrets, immediately, the choices he made to telephone, to engage with the interception in his mind, to play right into the bastard's hands. 

It isn't that he doesn't want talk to Charles. It isn't that they haven't...so much, so much to bring them together. It is only that he is an impossible being, a nightmare of a man with so such terrible self-righteousness and pomposity that nine times out of ten, Erik is certain he ought to be done away with, and in all of those times he is only reminded of his own inability to act on such compulsions because his heart, which is not something that ever dominates his behaviour, not ever, it is not something that can be adequately relied upon, no. Charles, in essence, is every one of Erik's own limitations, both mutant and character, past and present. A mirror, reflecting everything he could have won if he were willing to abandon that which makes him Lehnsherr, and his presence and continued existence is maddening but, in the least fathomable of ways, vital. The grit that helps him stick each footstep in this frustrating, flawed, perpetually shifting world.

“It’s good to hear from you, old friend,” Charles says, quickly breaking into the pause, a beat before he ought to, a dart of desperation that Erik feels the man would like to have kept back.

“I know what you’ve been up to,” Erik replies, trying a new trick, one he concocted in the hour he lay naked between old sheets debating whether or not to make this call. The smallest of sounds, Charles nearly clearing his throat but not quiet, a familiarity with the man’s terrible track record for deceit, confirms it’s had an effect. 

“You should move back in,” Charles says out loud, his counterweight, worked once, hasn’t it, might as well keep trying. 

“You need to stop asking. Stop…everything. Charles, we can’t.”

“I know. I only…wanted to check. To remind you.”

“How could I ever forget?”

It’s the pauses in conversation that say the most. Here’s another.

“Erik, please. You deserve a better life than this.”

“Deserve? You of all people know that such principles are meaningless to us.”

“Have you had any coffee this morning? You sound a little fractious.”

“Drop that act, Charles. I’ve had no coffee, and am indeed, a little fractious. Calling me, offering me fairytales you know neither of us can sustain. Shall I come and lecture your students on the evil of humanity? Shall I tell them the truths about the acts committed against us? Shall I fill them full of fear and loathing for themselves, for each other, for this sorry, bleak, cruel little planet we inhabit?”

“I mean, one or two of them could probably use the-“

“Again, I ask you to drop the act. Be honest. We had more than we should have. We’ve done more than we ought. I know our paths will always cross, and I know you’ll never stop…being who you are, Charles, I know who you are and what you do and why you do it, and…I forgive you.”

“You what?”

“Fuck that. Of course I don’t fucking forgive a single thing you do. You use people, Charles, you use me, you use your students, you use your friends, you use your enemies, you use everyone to your own fucking ends, to cure your own fear of being alone, Charles, just you with the thoughts and the space in which to think them, up in your own little cerebral mind, so scared that you’ll turn around and discover that nobody’s coming for you, nobody cares, everyone’s forgotten the Professor, and there’s nothing to fight for or against.”

“Feel better, do you?”

“Rarely.”

“It is…true, though…”

“I know. Don’t get into it. I just called to say...”

He debates the pause, a rollercoaster of internal conflict. 

“I just called to say…stop.”

The dialtone that follows suggests Charles is either at his most acquiescent, or melodramatic.

Erik tries to feel at the edge of his mind for more. Something, some sign, some internal stretching of a thought, appearance of an interference, or perhaps the absence of it. He flicks through memories, decades, countries, and everything is as intact as ever it might have been. But how would he know? 

How has he ever known? 

He exhales, and unclenches white knuckles from the receiver, replacing it with a sigh. 

There's so much to carry, and the desire to stand tall and shed the load from your shoulders is great and unyielding. Erik takes identity, pleasure, necessity and strength in turns from the experiences, hard, harder and unimaginable, that have shaped and built the mutant he is.

It's all well and good spending your time pushing back, pushing forwards. Erik has tried and failed. The self always catches up with him. But what if it could simply...disappear? After all, it takes a certain level of consciousness, a fury, a sensation that must be channelled and driven...

...Charles could never lock that away from him, though. There is no safety catch, at least, not one either of them know, nor one anyone they know can possess. Except...but no. It goes no further. The agony of possibility, of who they might be if they were not themselves, tortures them both in the quiet and the dark and the spaces between the wars.

Both Erik and Charles are built on power, and the older Erik gets, the deeper that realisation goes. Charles? He is too busy, Erik thinks, too self-interested, that's cruel, but maybe he deserves it, too...involved, less willing to give up, keener to be in the mix than to sit back and run the damn school. They're always preparing for the next fight, the next crisis, the next uprising.

They are old, and will not be prettier, or more for each other than they are even now, and even now, Charles counts back missed chances to be more and rues them. Erik knows this because what other reason could there be for the memories coming back to him with the warmth and rose-tint about them than Charles' planting them there for him, breadcrumbs along a trail he cannot follow.


End file.
